Coming to Grips with Remediation

Coming to Grips with Remediation

As court action grinds on in the thousands of cases of defective
Chinese drywall in houses near the Gulf and Atlantic coasts,
there’s finally starting to be some action in the real world:
people have started fixing the homes afflicted with the defective
material.
The court-ordered pilot remediation program of 300 homes
involved in litigation in the New Orleans Federal District court
will be carried out by a large commercial contracting firm,
Moss & Associates
Moss’ portfolio includes state prisons, high-rise condos, and
the Florida Marlins baseball stadium. That’s an impressive
track record; but to some, the big firm seems like an odd fit for a
succession of small one-house residential gut-rehabs on scattered
sites. And individual homeowners who may be trying to fix their
homes with their own cash, outside of the court-managed program,
are more likely to turn to the more traditional residential
remodeling market.
But how does a homeowner find a contractor? It’s a puzzle,
says Tampa Bay builder and remodeler Eric Stockland of
Charter Bay
Homes
. There’s a lot of information out there, Stockland
observes — but much of it is wrong. “Not to name any
names,” says Stockland, “but there are some sources out
there who have made themselves seem very official, who are just
frauds. And to a regular homeowner, who’s not real savvy, you
really have to know what you’re looking at to realize that
you’re being sold a bill of goods.”
Stockland has been working in the Tampa Bay area for about 16
years — first as the owner of his own remodeling company,
then as a project manager for U.S. Home and as a V.P. for Lennar,
and then finally as Chief Operating Officer for luxury homebuilders
Nohl Crest Homes. But the collapse of the Florida market took Nohl
Crest down, and Stockland ended up a remodeler again. These days,
about half his small company’s revenue comes from Chinese
drywall remediation. As Stockland observes, a good drywall
remediation contractor benefits from experience as a remodeler and
as a production builder. The demolition and removal part of the job
is a classic remodeling task; but once the house is gutted to the
studs, you’re basically just setting the clock back and
completing a homebuilding job from the dry-in stage on.
Now, Stockland is assembling an impressive set of YouTube videos
explaining how Chinese drywall remediation works. On the one hand,
it’s marketing for his company; but Stockland says he also
hopes his videos will prove useful for homeowners outside the Tampa
Bay area. “Ideally,” he explains, “we’d
like to become a knowledge resource for anyone with Chinese
drywall. We don’t know how many videos we’ll have in
the end, because I’ve got tons of raw footage. But we want to
have 20 or 25 videos that will walk a homeowner through the entire
process, so that no matter where they live, they can watch and
understand how it should be done — and it can help them
select a Chinese drywall contractor who’s the real deal, who
can actually take care of them, and at the end of the process they
will get a house that they can live in again.”
Already, Charter Bay’s video set is a valuable information
resource — not just for customers, but as a good introduction
for any other contractor who may want to tackle Chinese drywall
remediation work. One of the most useful segments is a two-part
pair of videos where Stockland steps through two sets of
specifications for Chinese drywall remediation: Judge Eldon
Fallon’s court order in the New Orleans litigation, and the
remediation protocol put out by the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) and the Consumer Products Safety Commission
(CPSC). Item by item, Stockland compares Fallon’s order with
the CPSC’s recommendations, and then he weighs in with his
own company’s recommendation (based on the assumption that
the homeowner, and not a court defendant, will have to bear the
cost of repairs).
So for example, where Fallon assumes that cabinets and
countertops will have to be completely replaced (on the drywall
manufacturer’s dime), Stockland recommends carefully
removing, storing, and re-installing the cabinets (which could save
tens of thousands of dollars for the homeowners). But when it comes
to wiring, Stockland agrees with Fallon — it all comes
out.
And Stockland delves into the fine points of what to keep and
what to junk. For instance, indoor air conditioner coils are
typically ruined. But what about the outdoor coils, which
haven’t been exposed to sulfuric gases? Those units should be
inspected for damage, but even more important, Stockland notes, is
the possible effect of EPA-mandated changes in refrigerants sold in
the U.S. market. Explains Stockland: “The homes that
we’re typically seeing have the old refrigerant. And when we
go to replace the inside unit, the air handler, we also have to
replace the outside unit so that the refrigerant types
match.”
Stockland’s advice on how to safely remove and store
granite countertops, without breaking them, is well worth the time
spent to watch that clip. But even better is his detailed
walk-through of methods for labeling, photographing, and
documenting every sheet of drywall removed — required in
Judge Fallon’s order as preservation of evidence for anyone
who hopes to be reimbursed for the cost of remediation out of a
Federal court damage award.
Stockland’s laid-back manner on the videos partially
disguises his natural character as a compulsive organizer. But
there’s no missing the telltale signs of a hyper-organized
contractor in the methods he shares: numbering each sheet of
drywall in place, photographing the “made in China”
label on the back, annotating the blueprints with the location of
each piece, and even stitching the photos together into a
360-degree panorama of each room. This isn’t bull-and-jam
demolition — it’s systematic, carefully documented
dis-assembly.
The perfectionism of a high-end builder and remodeler leaves
Eric Stockland himself a little dissatisfied with his video
product. “As I look at my videos,” he confesses,
“there are parts of them that I really can’t stand. I
wish I had done it better, and I wish I had better lighting and
this and that. But then I tell myself, it’s okay, the
information is there. It doesn’t look as professional as I
want it to look sometimes, but that’s all right. The
homeowner can use it for the purpose that it was intended for. And
the idea is not to be fear-mongering. It’s just to say,
‘Okay -- you got a problem. Here is what the bona fide
experts say needs to be done, and here is how we actually go about
doing it.’ I fully expect that the majority of the people who
look at that won’t be my actual customers, but I think
there’s some value in sharing the information.”